Ships
- HMS Euryalus (42) Captain from 15 June 1944 · Relieved on 24 September 1945
Richard Oliver-Bellasis was born on 15 September 1900 at Foleshill, Warwickshire. He joined the Royal Navy in the closing phase of the First World War and was made a midshipman on 1 January 1917. He became an acting sub-lieutenant on 15 November 1918, a sub-lieutenant on 15 July 1919, and a lieutenant on 15 August 1920. Early in that rank he specialised in torpedoes.
Promotion to lieutenant-commander came on 15 August 1928, and to commander on 31 December 1933. From 1932 to 1934 he served in the battlecruiser Renown in the Home Fleet. A spell at the Admiralty followed, and in 1936 he passed through the Staff College at Greenwich. He then went out to the China Station as commander of the aircraft carrier Eagle, where he served from 1937 to 1939.
The Admiralty promoted him captain on 30 June 1941. During the middle years of the war he held appointments ashore and afloat, and in 1943 he completed a damage-control course. On 19 September 1943 he was already captain of the Dido-class light cruiser Euryalus when Rear-Admiral Philip Vian hauled down his flag in the ship. That first turn in command lasted until 25 November 1943, when the cruiser went into dockyard hands. Oliver-Bellasis returned as her captain on 15 June 1944.
Through the summer of 1944 Euryalus was completing a long refit and modification on the Clyde, including a new gunnery fire-control system that still needed nursing when the ship went north. In July she shifted between Govan and Greenock as the yard work drew to a close, then worked up from Scapa Flow. On 28 September 1944 Oliver-Bellasis took her to sea for Operation Tenable. Euryalus left Scapa Flow with the escort carriers Fencer and Trumpeter and a screen of destroyers to cover aircraft mining Ramisoysund, Lepsoyrev, and Harhamsfjord on the Norwegian coast.
The cruiser afterwards went east to join the British Pacific Fleet. She passed through the Suez Canal, called at Colombo, and reached Trincomalee in Ceylon. As Euryalus cleared that harbour, Oliver-Bellasis told the ship's company that the next port would be Fremantle, and that on the passage the carriers would fly strikes against the Japanese-held oil refineries at Palembang in the Netherlands East Indies. He kept command through the fleet's final months of the war. On 29 August 1945 Euryalus entered Hong Kong with the cruiser Swiftsure and the Canadian landing ship Prince Robert. He was relieved on 24 September 1945.
In the 1946 honours he was appointed a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and mentioned in despatches. He went back to his specialist work as Director of Underwater Weapons from 1947 to 1950, and on 1 January 1951 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath. An engineer officer who joined Euryalus in the Clyde refit, and who later served under both Oliver-Bellasis and his successor, Captain R. S. Warne, remembered Oliver-Bellasis as the more intellectual of the two captains and Warne as the stronger leader of the ship's company.